- Network: Paramount+
- Series Premiere Date: Mar 20, 2025
Critic Reviews
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The performances of Ashford and Quaid, and the wry tone of Happy Face are what makes us want to keep watching.
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It stands on its own two feet as a drama and tells a grisly story without exploiting the victims or making the viewer feel cheapened or complicit merely by the act of watching.
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Not everything works, but Happy Face is a largely intriguing and intense show. The suspense alone is enough to keep watching.
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Even though Happy Face's initial tonal and dialogue weaknesses contribute to it falling just short of its potential, its comprehensive message — living with intricate wounds, elevating the scum of the earth while abandoning the victims, America's profoundly flawed justice system, and the racist incarceration system — slices through the noise loud and clear.
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Happy Face's first season is involving enough to make it worth seeing through to the end, but the novel setup starts to feel a bit gimmicky as Keith's role in the mystery becomes clearer. Though the season ends with the door open for future installments, the possibilities seem largely exhausted as this one draws to a close.
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While the social commentary can get a little tone-deaf and the family drama a tad bit manufactured, the writing maintains momentum through eight hours of television in a way that a lot of bloated modern shows fail to do, setting up a second season in the last hour that may finally get all of these competing voices to sing in harmony.
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Despite a strong start, Happy Face suffers from the common problem of a story that would be better served as a movie rather than eight hours of extra long episodes.
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The show pushes hard for the audience to feel a certain way but only effectively does so in a few scenes with honesty, like when Melissa and her brother (played by Philip Ettinger) confide in each other or during some of Elijah’s story. The rest of Happy Face is too dramatized and simply gets lost in an effort to stand out.
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Basically, “Happy Face” jumps off from the real story then moves into fiction immediately, a disappointment for anyone expecting this “true crime” story to be, well, true.
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The central push-pull between Melissa and Keith. That dance is captivating. .... But the messiness of their relationship sits uneasily alongside the straightforward search for evidence to free Elijah, and can lose its grip when broadened from a two-hander to a broader ensemble. “Happy Face” intrigues, yet its form can’t quite sync up with its function.
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The real hang-up with “Happy Face” is that there is a marked lack of urgency to the entire production. Ms. Ashford’s performance seems confused—she’s animated when she shouldn’t be, and short of anxiety when the moment demands it. Mr. Quaid revels in craziness, but the editing of the show is such that we never seem to get a sustained performance.
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Happy Face treads a very wobbly line and occasionally stays on track. It critiques true-crime fandom while also offering up more of the same to its already rabid audience.
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The whole thing feels tired, shoddy and half-baked.
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The reason Happy Face marks the nadir of true-crime ghastliness is that it seems to realise that this is all a game – as Melissa embarks on some sleuthing of her own to try and find out whether or not her father killed a ninth girl (and whether, therefore, an innocent man is on death row), the show veers dangerously close to jauntiness.
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Paramount+’s Happy Face vacillates between sanctimonious and hypocritical, lashing out at the exploitative tropes of true crime and then embodying the genre’s worst instincts, with nothing especially perceptive to offer as compensation. It’s a show that’s at least paying lip service to doing something interesting, but there are too many intellectual hurdles it can’t clear.